PRESS RELEASE

Smart Campus Innovation Series Accelerates Problem-Solving for Global Community Challenges

Combining the power of crowdsourcing with the UN Global Goals

New York, New York, July 18th, 2018 - Today, The New Bureau announces the launch of the Smart Campus Innovation Series as a platform to rapidly crowdsource and develop an open-sourced playbook for universities, corporations, and civic institutions, to accelerate the adoption of sustainable city and community strategies.

The “Smart City” phenomenon is gaining momentum, from neighborhoods to entire regions around the world. Realizing the profound need to make their communities safer, more efficient, and more environmentally sustainable, public and private entities are now working, hand-in-hand, to navigate a wealth of innovative solutions.

As Smart Cities are burdened with political, regulatory, and technology hurdles, The New Bureau saw an opportunity to focus on campuses as a more scalable path to accelerate problem-solving for UN Sustainable Development Goal 11: Sustainable Cities and Communities.

By rapidly creating alignment around common issues and applications, along with a map of technology solutions, potential roadblocks, and policy issues, the Smart Campus Innovation Series enables ideation to rapidly transform into productive and accountable momentum. The Smart Campus Innovation Series also showcases the best projects and success stories, with a detailed look behind the scenes at how they defined successful outcomes and overcame obstacles to achieve the intended success.

The result of the ten-campus series is an open-source playbook -- crowdsourced from the best minds at institutions around the world, to speed the understanding and knowledge transfer from citizens, students, technologists, academics, enterprises, municipalities, and policy makers.

Smart Campus Innovation Series Recap Video

 “We aim to accelerate actionable solutions and promote positive social impact through the use of open-source tools and methods. The UN Sustainable Development Goals have attracted a global community of problem-solvers, and we see Smart Campus as a strategic path toward sustainable cities and communities in our rapidly changing world.” 

— Peter E Raymond, Founder, The New Bureau

The Smart Campus Innovation Series kicked off at the University of Denver’s Ritchie School of Engineering and Computer Science with Project X-ITE, in May 2018, and is now expanding to nine additional campuses, including a mix of academic, corporate, and civic communities. The most actionable insight generated was the need to develop “living labs,” which enable the prototyping and testing of ideas and solutions, at a high velocity, in low-cost and low-risk environments, Any campus that already has a makerspace or fabrication lab can quickly enable Smart Campus prototyping.

Students, faculty, and VC work on Smart Campus Energy Infrastructure at the University of Denver

Dean JB Holston and Jacob Goldman, the University of Denver Student and Innovation Floor Manager, share their mobility concept

Industry experts in Smart Cities, Internet of Things, and AI, including Hitachi Vantara, Arrow Electronics, and Splunk, partnered to help educate, explore, and facilitate problem-solving to make this series possible. Included among the topics being dissected and explored, are infrastructure, energy, water, waste, mobility, housing, community engagement, reskilling, technology, citizenship, food supply chain, sustainability, environmental change, policy, data privacy, and security.

Matthew Bailey, of Arrow, explaining opportunities for triple bottom line business models in IoT and Smart Communities

“The Smart Campus Innovation Series run at the University of Denver was a series of powerful ideation workshops between IoT and Smart City Leaders from the private sector and academia. The New Bureau team created a vibrant collaborative atmosphere that resulted in a Smart Campus blueprint that would be beneficial for many of our national campuses. Arrow views this as an important national initiative where technology delivers great experiences and business outcomes.” 

Developed by The New Bureau (a New York-based social impact lab and technology studio, focused on finding solutions to thoughtfully accelerate the UN Sustainable Development Goals), the Smart Campus Innovation Series involves two days of immersive learning, sharing, and problem identification, followed by rapid prototyping of potential design iterations and solutions across infrastructure, applications, technology, and policy. The unique, crowdsourced process leverages the brain power and diversity of the attendees to quickly and efficiently share knowledge, and develop a diverse range of content and real-world solutions, while shedding preconceptions and learned limitations. All learnings and discoveries are thoroughly documented to create the open-source Smart Campus playbook.

Justin Bean, of Hitachi Vantara, facilitating ecosystem understanding of a Smart Community

“The Smart Campus Innovation session brought university, private and public organizations together to define what was important for their own community. The group defined pragmatic operational, safety and quality of life improvements leveraging IoT and data insights - well done!”

The sessions are powered by SolveOS, a platform enabled by a real-time, AI content-capture engine that allows hundreds of pieces of hand-written, drawn, and video-captured content to be catalogued, tagged, and referenced, through both computer vision and natural language processing.

Students working on a platform to utilize student data and behavior, in order to create advisory software, with an emphasis on privacy and security, across health, nutrition, fitness, courseware, academic, and social activities.

We are currently working with campuses across the academic, corporate, and civic communities who are aiming to thrive in a world with a rapidly and exponentially changing environment, population, and technology. If organizations are interested in learning more, or in participating as a campus or thought-leader partner, please contact us here: